Today, it only takes moments for a new story to appear about the latest technological breakthrough. Some of us foresee great opportunities from new types of jobs and are excited about knowledge from the ‘beyond’ and ‘other’ horizons of technology innovation.

But for most people, the view of the future is laced with negativity, with talk turning to the impending Armageddon for human workers. Will our place in the jobs market be overtaken by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) like bricklaying robots, AI-enabled company directors, driverless transport, and even cookie baking bots?

Of course, disruption is not just about technology, there are other powerful global forces at play. These include geopolitical instability, the global outsourcing of jobs, the globalisation of professional skills, the ageing of society, and the displacement of 20th century analogue businesses by born-digital enterprises. All of which generate a degree of understandable anxiety.

How we respond is critical to how the future plays out. In this article, we will paint a future landscape framed in three perspectives — a background, midground and foreground.

The background perspective

From this perspective, the past tells us how change plays out. Throughout history, progress has evoked dystopian fears of a loss of livelihood. Yet each new wave of innovation — from hunting to agriculture, from the industrial to the information age — has created growth, prosperity, and jobs.

Now we’re entering the age of intelligent technologies where a digital environment connects people, data, and things. Some call this the fourth industrial revolution. We call also call it the digital social era. In Japan, the term “the super-smart society” has also been used, reflecting their intent to harness new technologies to create a better society for all.

The scale and speed of this transition make it unique. The global population should reach around 8.1 billion people by 2025, with 55% of these people being of working age (United Nations, World Populations Prospects Reports: 2015 Revision). This suggests that 2 billion people could be facing unemployment and/or re-skilling in the coming decade, raising concern over global jobs wars.

In post-industrial economies, education and human services programmes will be heavily impacted. We could see a generation, or more, of displaced workers, leading to increased pressure on social support systems.

The midground perspective

What will workers be doing in 2025? Which jobs will be unstable, which will be growing, and which new jobs will emerge? This infographic combines research and imagination, showing the relative impact of the major groupings of disruptive technologies on each sector.

Jobs in 2025 [Download the infographic]

The foreground perspective

Finally, to complete this future landscape, the foreground is the fabric of working life in 2025. It shows what attributes, worker skill sets, and aptitudes will be needed as well as the required organisational factors for mastery and leadership of an enterprise in the exponential digital social world.

Standing back to inspect the canvas, we see the outline of a super smart society, with automation and intelligent machines being deployed to deliver a better society for all.

Workplace attribute [Download the infographic]

For more detail on how your business can leverage the opportunities of digital disruption, download the executive summary and the white paper by clicking below.

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